In Aoife Clifford’s third novel, the death of a local celebrity brings two old schoolmates together to answer some troubling questions. In a small town, news spreads, and in this particular small town – Welcome by name, though not always by nature – glamorous Vanessa Walton was a phenomenon: Vanessa Walton was no longer singing on a rickety stage in a middle-sized country town; she was a star, a giant supernova, and everyone in that room was spinning helplessly in her orbit. Which begs a lot of questions about why she ended up as she did: The body lay at the bottom of the stairs in a geome ..read more

Miranda Darling deploys all the voices in her protagonist’s head to reveal a fraught relationship in this allusive novella. Winona Dalloway, like Mrs Dalloway in Virginia Woolf’s novel of that name, often finds herself ‘lilting between observing life from the outside and the desire to be fully present in it’. There are echoes of Virginia Woolf’s novel throughout Thunderhead, but Winona, unlike Woolf’s heroine, questions and resists the urge to conform. She is helped by the voices in her head, which are like the voices we all hear but do not acknowledge – voices of reason, desire, knowledge an ..read more

It’s Flashback Friday: Jessica Stewart reviews Robinne Lee’s 2017 novel of an older woman and a younger man which is getting renewed attention thanks to a film adaptation. Is there a right way to love? In a thousand ways we are told what is acceptable, ethical, honourable, right. Robinne Lee’s novel asks why we allow ourselves to squash our needs and desires into these boxes of conformity. Solène Marchand is a 39-year-old co-owner of a stylish mid-size art gallery in Los Angeles, specialising in representing work of women and people of colour. She co-parents her young daughter with her ex, en ..read more

A new crime novel by Garry Disher is always exciting. In Sanctuary, he introduces a new protagonist: a female lone wolf. Meet Grace. She’s a very good thief, having been taught by experts and practising since she was a kid. Specialising in small, high-value hauls, she’s mobile and extremely astute – this is a woman who knows her Jaeger-LeCoultre watches from the Patek Philippes. She’s also always moving, very watchful, cautious to a fault. And tired of that life. She’d been calling herself Grace for a while now. Too long, probably. She’d be safer using one of the other names, of which she ha ..read more

In Travis Baldree’s latest fantasy novel, his warrior’s quest is not to slay dragons but to save a failing bookstore. Travis Baldree’s second novel can be enjoyed as a standalone or as the prequel to his bestselling Legends and Lattes. If you don’t already adore Viv, the tough orc mercenary with a poorly-hidden sensitive side, then you just might be about to in this excursion into her past. After a bout of dangerous self-confidence on her first proper mission with the mercenary group Rackam’s Ravens, Viv is left behind in the sleepy seaside town of Murk, forced to rest her injured leg and und ..read more

Donna M Cameron’s second novel is both a fast-paced tale of a whistleblower on the run, and a paean to the beauty of the natural world. The instant he ruins his life a vision of his mother explodes in his head. He can’t see her face, yet he knows she is smiling. The day Jagger blows the whistle on the Greengate Waste Removal scam his father’s business is running, he is already in shock after overhearing his fiancée, Lola, telling a friend how her mum had researched ‘the sons of the Fin Review Rich List’, and how she, Lola, had engineered the ‘accidental meeting’ which Jagger had always believ ..read more

Cancel culture is nothing new: Scott Eyman’s biography shows how Charlie Chaplin’s fame was no protection when the tide turned against him. I flip-flopped into success from being a frightened, lonely person … Success brought life into focus and showed me the hollowness of men who run the world and of their solemn pronouncements. – Charlie Chaplin Scott Eyman says that it took him slightly less than 60 years to write this book on Charlie Chaplin. When he was 12 he bought a print of Chaplin’s two-reeler Easy Street (1917)  – the Tramp reforms himself, becomes a policeman and saves a beaut ..read more

In Sulari Gentill’s new novel, aspiring writer Theo and her brother Gus become embroiled in increasingly bizarre conspiracy theories. The Mystery Writer is the latest book by the prolific and always intriguing Australian author Sulari Gentill. Set in the USA, as her recent novels mostly have been, this one puts another twist on a concept she’s been experimenting with: the idea of the crime writer, and the story they are developing, being part of the larger story the novel tells. This time, though, it’s less metafiction and more the story of a writer who gets caught up in a mystery. Theodosia ..read more

Liam Murphy’s debut novel is both a road trip across the US and a journey into the past. It’s tempting to invoke the first stanza of Philip Larkin’s famous poem ‘This Be The Verse’ here. That’s because The Roadmap of Loss is about unresolved childhood psychological trauma, and it’s on you, Mum and Dad. The narrator, Mark Ward, is a recently orphaned 25 year old, and this compassionate novel is about how he finally goes about (‘decides’ would be wrong) treating both his lifelong neurosis and his grief over the sudden loss of his mother. It’s also a worthy redux of the classic American road tri ..read more

Through the story of Matilda, Robyn Bishop’s novel reveals the constrained lives of women in rural New South Wales in the late 1800s. It is July 1892 and Matilda is just old enough to help Clara out of her cot, change her nappy and dress her, but not old enough to understand why the baby, Lily, has died. Mama had said that the angels had come and taken Lily with them. Matilda’s tasks are to feed Lily porridge and gravy, to sponge her at bath time after Mama pours heated water in the big enamel dish, and ferry her around the yard while Mama hangs out the washing. No more. Heaven means gone, n ..read more